Starting at around 1PM ET on December 24, Steam experienced an outage that impacted users ability to access the game store and play games online. Valve didn’t acknowledge the outage publicly, but SteamDB’s unofficial Steam Status page reported that the Steam Store, Steam Community, and Steam Web APIs were all offline.
DownDetector received over 6,000 outage reports around 1:15PM ET, and Steam is also inaccessible from Valve’s mobile apps. The outage appears to be affecting APIs for Valve’s online games, like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Counterstrike 2, as well.
By around 4PM ET, Steam itself had begun to rebound, and as of 6PM ET, the platform had largely recovered, with the main PC, mobile and Mac clients broadly fully functional, but ocassionally erroring out. There are still parts of the service that are extremely sluggish and, according to SteamDB, many of Valve’s online games are down or only partially functional.
Steam’s last major outage was in October, when the store and online services were unavailable for an hour. Earlier in September, the launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong temporarily took down Steam, the Xbox Store and Nintendo’s eShop due to how many people tried to download the game at the same time.
Update, December 24, 6PM ET: This story has been updated to note which Valve offerings are currently functional and when they recovered.
Indie studio Santa Ragione said it is at risk of shutting down as its latest project won’t be available on Steam, which is by far the biggest storefront for PC games and a key point of sale for many developers. Horses, a first-person horror game that blends gameplay and live-action sequences, is about a college student who spends a summer working on a farm. However, the farm’s “horses” are actually naked human adults who are wearing horse masks. It’s clear from the trailer that this is a game for grownups.
“We reviewed the game back in 2023. At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later. Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines,” Valve told PC Gamer. “After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam.”
Santa Ragione wrote in an FAQ that it’s “committed to producing challenging, adult storytelling. Horses uses grotesque, subversive imagery to confront power, faith, and violence. We reject subjective obscenity standards and believe this kind of moralizing censorship evokes a darker past in which vague notions of ‘decency’ were used to silence artists. Games are an artistic medium and lawful works for adults should remain accessible. We respect players enough to present the game as intended and to let adults choose what to play; lawful works should not be made unreachable by a monopolistic storefront’s opaque decisions.”
This particular ban precedes the recent censorship of adult-oriented games at the behest of payment processors. Santa Ragione wanted to create a Steam store page for Horses back in 2023 to help build interest. The studio says Valve wanted to see a playable build of the game before it would approve a Coming Soon page. The game was nowhere close to being finished, so Santa Ragione scrambled to put together a playable version of the game with “tons of placeholders.”
According to an email from Valve that the developer shared, it banned Horses from the storefront over “content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.” Santa Ragione said Valve didn’t provide more detailed reasons for rejecting the game. Valve noted that it wouldn’t accept further submissions of Horses, “even with modifications.”
The developer claimed that it spent the next two years trying to change Valve’s mind, but the company repeatedly pointed it to Steam’s general guidelines and rejected its “requests for review and appeal.” Santa Ragione does have a plausible theory as to why Valve blocked the game from Steam, however. The studio wrote in the FAQ that:
All characters in the game are clearly older than 20 years old, as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game. We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm.
The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the ‘horses’ are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one. What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag.
We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.
As a result of the Steam ban, Santa Ragione claimed it will be “very difficult“ to recoup its investment on Horses, which it claims is “not pornographic”. It spent around $100,000 on the game’s development.
The studio initially put $50,000 of its own money into Horses after signing a deal with the game’s creator, Andrea Lucco Borlera. It hoped to cover those costs with sales of its last game, Saturnalia, but that didn’t perform nearly as well as the studio hoped. Horses was slated to be featured in a bundle, but that fell apart around the same time as Valve rejected the game. Santa Ragione said the Steam ban made it practically impossible for it to find an external publisher or partner, so it ultimately raised funds from friends in order to complete the game. As such, the studio claimed it is now “in a completely unsustainable financial situation unless the game somehow recoups its development costs.”
Santa Ragione still plans to support Horses for at least another six months after release. It has set aside funds to cover the costs of fixing bugs and adding quality-of-life changes. But barring Horses finding success on non-Steam storefronts, that may be the studio’s last activity.
“I don’t want to make a final decision before seeing how the game does on launch. But if things go the way that I expect them to go, then I think [studio’s closure] is inevitable,” Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva told GamesIndustry.biz. “All the money we’ll earn is gonna go to the author and to the people who have offered money to finish the project. So there will likely be no money left to make a new [game]… Unless a miracle happens and Horses does very well.”
Valve shook up the gaming world with the announcement of the Steam Machine, but we’re all still curious about the million-dollar question of pricing. While there’s plenty of speculation, we finally have some sort of indication from Valve directly. In an interview with Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that the Steam Machine will not be subsidized but will still have competitive pricing.
“I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said on the podcast. “Obviously, our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance, and then you have features that are actually really hard to build if you’re making your own gaming PC from parts.”
Griffais didn’t offer a concrete price range since Valve was still early in the process, adding that “right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating.” When asked if the Steam Machine would be subsidized like how other companies often sell new consoles at a loss or slim profit margin to generate early momentum, Griffais said no and that it would be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
However, Griffais also revealed that Valve is potentially interested in doing a Steam Machine Pro, but that the company is currently focused on this mid-range level as a “good trade off between affordability and the level of power we get.”
Valve made a big return to PC hardware this week. The company, most famous for its PC gaming platform, Steam, announced a new home console called Steam Machine alongside a new version of the Steam Controller, and a new virtual reality headset dubbed the Steam Frame.
The Steam Machine is a revival of Valve’s original Steam Machine, a failed attempt to bring PC gaming to the living room almost exactly 10 years ago. Now, it’s back, built on the success of the Steam Deck handheld. Valve claims the new Steam Machine is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, and it’s kind of like a compact PC. We don’t have exact measurements yet, but some early hands-on impressions have called it similar in size to the Nintendo GameCube. The Steam Machine uses a custom Zen 4 CPU from AMD, and will reportedly be sold in several memory and storage configurations, which are user-upgradable. The new Steam Controller is meant to be paired with the Steam Machine, and it has two haptic-feedback trackpads and the typical assortment of thumbsticks, buttons, triggers, and bumpers.
Lastly, there’s the Steam Frame. This long-awaited VR headset is the follow-up to the Valve Index, which is over six years old. Valve calls the Steam Frame a “streaming-first” VR headset, meant to be connected to a PC for lag-free, wireless gaming. To overcome the problem of latency, the Steam Frame will come with a dedicated wireless module to connect to your PC to ensure all the visual data is transferred as smoothly as possible.
The Steam Frame can also be used as a stand-alone headset, running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, meaning you’d be playing x86 games on ARM in SteamOS. It’s a tricky endeavor, but based on the success of the Steam Deck in juggling the emulation layers required, I trust Valve to do it in a way Microsoft has always struggled with. As for the headset itself, it only weighs 440 grams, which is significantly lighter than both the Meta Quest 3S and the recently announced Samsung Galaxy XR. It has two pancake lenses with two LCD screens at 2160 x 2160 pixels per eye.
There’s a lot more to learn about these devices, and none of the new hardware has a firm release date or price yet, as is customary with Valve. All we know is that these devices will begin shipping in early 2026. —Luke Larsen
A Pouch for Your iPhone
Courtesy of Apple
You’ve probably already seen or heard about the iPhone Pocket. Inspired by a “piece of cloth,” it’s a tiny shoulder bag designed to carry around your iPhone, and it stems from a collaboration between Apple and Japanese design brand Issey Miyake. The two companies have enjoyed a long history—Steve Jobs famously wore Issey Miyake’s black turtlenecks on stage during every major launch event.
The cloth is a singular 3D-knitted construction made in Japan and will be able to fit any iPhone model. This isn’t the first time Apple has suggested you put one of its products in a piece of cloth. In 2004, Apple debuted the iPod Socks, a simple and fun way to keep your iPod screen protected when traveling. They cost $29 at the time (about $50 today).
Unfortunately, you’ll be paying a heck of a lot more for the iPhone Pocket. The pouch comes in a short-strap version for $150 and a long-strap design for $230. Both are available in a range of colors, but since this is a special-edition release, you’re only able to purchase them at select Apple Store locations and Apple.com in France, China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and the US. (It’s already sold out online.)
Digital ID Comes to Apple Wallet
You already have your boarding pass on your iPhone, why not your passport, too? That’s the idea behind Apple’s new Digital ID, a new way to add information from your US passport into Apple Wallet. Acceptance is rolling out in beta at TSA checkpoints in more than 250 airports around the US for domestic travel, though Apple says that will expand in the future.
You’ll be able to present this form of identification even if you don’t have a Real ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID. (You can already add your driver’s license to Apple Wallet, but this is only available in select states.) It’s important to remember, though, that Apple’s Digital ID does not replace a passport, which is still required for international travel.
Samsung’s Movingstyle Screens Can Go Wherever You Do
Courtesy of Samsung
Samsung has announced a new line of “portable” monitors that are meant to travel with you around your house or office. The Movingstyle (LSM7F) and Movingstyle M7 Smart Monitor (M70F) are standard 27- or 32-inch displays, with one big twist: They come with a rollable floor stand with hidden wheels. Rather than have separate large screens in each room, the idea behind these Movingstyle monitors is to have a screen on the go—similar to LG’s StanbyMe range. It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where this could be convenient. Maybe you’re following a recipe in the kitchen or want to finish a show you’re watching on your television in the bedroom. Samsung claims the wheels are quiet and stable on both hardwood floors and carpet.
Valve has announced a raft of new hardware, including a new VR headset, Steam Machine and Controller. The devices are all designed to usher in a new era of PC gaming, with Valve’s usual focus on the player. is a slender VR headset that connects wirelessly to your PC and has a built-in battery to rid you of those pesky cables. That focus on freedom extends to the Frame operating as a standalone device, like the Meta Quest.
At the same time, the company has revived its long-loved (but not massively successful) . This new model has semi-custom AMD silicon capable of running 4K games at 60 frames per second. Valve says it’s roughly six times as powerful as its portable unit, the Steam Deck. Rounding out the list is the controller, which looks like a Steam Deck with the screen cut out. But it’s not as if that’s a bad thing, especially as it’s got TMR sensors which, while using a different underlying technology, promise the same benefits as a Hall Effect stick.
As someone on the not particularly game-y end of the spectrum, I use announcements like this as an exercise to see how excited I would be. To that end, I’m curious how much Valve will charge for this gear when it makes its debut early next year. On one hand, the performance promises laid out here are fairly substantial but, on the other, this is also a company that sells the base model Steam Deck for less than a Switch 2.
That said, I would certainly get off the couch if there was a new Half-Life game in the works, and that seems plausible here. Nathan Ingraham is certainly getting his little hopes up that the revival of the Steam Machine too.
I was a massive fan of Even Realities’ original smart glasses and was excited to see what . Sadly, he was testing the specs with a beta version of the new software and found them lacking in several important ways. He’s urging folks to hold off buying these until the gaps in the software have all been filled in.
What a shame the fan noise is so bad.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
For years, the world has clamored for a modular, upgradeable gaming laptop offering the same longevity as a desktop. Now, Framework has achieved where so many have failed, selling an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 for its two-year-old Laptop 16. — quite literally, thanks to the cooling issues that mean the fans are running at full speed whenever you put it under heavy load.
But don’t leave your passport at home just yet.
Apple
Apple is rolling out a Digital ID to its wallet that will, at some point in the near future, be legally accepted at TSA checkpoints. It’s and can eventually be used as your ID for domestic flights. But, you know, probably worth reading all of the details before you declare your paper passport a thing of the past.
$250 gets you a lot of gear, including LiDAR.
(Steve Dent for Engadget)
DJI’s Neo was good but not great — short battery life, noisy propellers and a lack of object avoidance all dulled its shine. Now, the , leading our Steve Dent to call it “the best personal drone on the market.”
It feels like a distant memory by now, but right before the Nintendo Switch launched in 2017, it seemed like portable gaming was on its last life. Mobile games had gobbled up huge portions of the market, and most modern games required a lot of power to run on devices like the Nintendo 3DS. Fast-forward to today, and there are more ways to take your games outside the living room than ever.
This is a bit of an odd category because, to be quite frank, many of the devices currently on the market aren’t very good. Valve’s Steam Deck kicked off a wave of manufacturers looking to compete with the Nintendo Switch, but many of their offerings are rushed, buggy, or just not a great way to play games. A few have risen to the challenge, and I’m comfortable saying that there are finally some good options to choose from. I’ve spent hundreds of hours testing as many gaming handhelds as I could get my grubby hands on—these are the best.
Updated August 2024: Added new info on how to choose the right gaming handheld for you, and info about Asus Rog Ally software updates. We’ve also added new photos.
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What to Look For in a Gaming Handheld
The Switch may have set a new standard for portable gaming, but in the time since, the category has gotten increasingly complex. New platforms, new control schemes, and a range of battery life that runs the gamut from several hours to “don’t stray too far from a charger.” With that in mind, here are a few factors to keep in mind when deciding which one is right for you:
Platform: The Switch runs games that were designed (or at least adapted) for the Switch. Easy enough. Other handhelds can be a bit more complicated. On the Steam Deck, for example, Valve uses custom software and the Proton compatibility layer to make games run and play well on a handheld. Some handhelds just run Windows directly (which has its drawbacks). Make sure to see what games you want to play are available on which platform and how well they run before you buy.
Picture: If you’re gonna stare at your gaming handheld all day, it may as well have a great display. Many devices, like the Switch and the Steam Deck, have OLED variants with incredibly crisp, vibrant displays. However, better doesn’t always mean, er, better. Screens with higher resolutions and faster refresh rates can also drain more battery.
Power: Speaking of battery life, that’s one area where gaming handhelds can vary wildly. Some devices, like the Switch and the Steam Deck, are optimized as much as they can be for battery consumption. Still, running graphics-heavy games like Tears of the Kingdom will always use more battery than simpler games like Stardew Valley. On handhelds that run less optimized operating systems like Windows, battery can drain even faster. If you plan to use a lot of heavy battery-draining features or games, then you might want to pick up a portable charger.
Performance: The Switch notoriously runs on an underpowered processor compared to its competitors. Yet, its games make the most of it by being optimized for the hardware they run on. When it comes to games that were designed for Windows (whether they run on the Steam Deck, or Windows handhelds directly), they can require a lot more power to get the same kind of performance. Faster, more powerful processors can mean you’ll get a more fluid gaming experience. But, once again, keep in mind that faster processors use up more battery, so be sure to balance performance with power drain.
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Today, in a new update, Valve is changing how it sorts and displays user reviews on Steam in an attempt by the company to hide all the joke reviews and memes that are flooding the digital storefront.
The Top Ten Most Played Games On Steam Deck: March 2023 Edition
For over a decade now, players have been able to leave text reviews for games on Steam. These reviews could be long or short, positive or negative, and are intended to help people decide if they want to invest time and money in a given game. However, in recent years Steam store pages have become flooded by joke reviews that are basically useless. Now, Valve has had enough and is making some changes that might lead to fewer joke and meme reviews.
On August 14, Valve published a news blog about its plans to update Steam reviews in an effort to make them more helpful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions” about games they might want to buy. But the current system, where players vote on which reviews are “helpful,” isn’t working. So Valve is going to start identifying “unhelpful” reviews and make them harder to see.
According to Valve, “one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ASCII art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and will be “sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page.”
How is Valve identifying unhelpful, joke reviews?
Valve clarifies that players might still see “humorous, but unhelpful” reviews, but the goal is that they show up far less often when people are just trying to learn more about a game. The company says there will be an option you can toggle on for those who like these silly reviews and still want to see them.
Screenshot: Valve / Kotaku
So how will Valve identify unhelpful reviews? The company says reviews will be marked unhelpful using Steam moderators, user reports, and some “machine learning algorithms.”
“Our team has found that a lot of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot,” said Valve. “So we’re targeting those first. This is a work in process, and will likely take quite a while for our team to evaluate the existing reviews and newly posted reviews.”
You might be wondering, why even leave these unhelpful reviews up? Valve says that it’s found that “many players want to express an opinion about the game” but they don’t always have the right words to do so. So it says these sillier reviews are still “valuable data,” even if they aren’t traditional reviews.
There you go. You can still do your silly reviews, but now people won’t have to scroll through 200 of them making the same joke just to see if the game is good or not. This seems like a smart change and one which has long been overdue.
Gloucester public works crews made quick work stemming the flow and repairing a major water main break on Maplewood Avenue, not far from the intersection with Poplar Street near the Babson Reservoir and the Babson Water Treatment Facility Monday night.
DPW Director Mike Hale said a video he was sent around the time of the break showed water gushing out of the street with police blocking off the area to traffic just before the underpass of Route 128. Traffic had been detoured away from the area during the water work.
By 7:56 p.m., he said, crews had pretty much stopped the water from flowing. Within six hours overnight, he said, crews were able to repair the break. Some further cleanup of the street was required on Tuesday. He said despite the large hole that was opened in the roadway by the force of the water, the roadway was reopened overnight.
The DPW put out a statement that said if residents were experiencing brown water, they should run the cold water tap for 10 minutes to flush out the lines.
If problems persist, the DPW says to call 978-325-5600 so the department can send a crew out to do some spot flushing.
Hale said the 16-inch water main did not fail, but hardware holding a fitting in place “at the old line stop” from maintenance done several decades ago did. However, the prior work to install a valve allowed crews to isolate where the water was shut off to the immediate area. Hale said the entire city felt the drop in pressure, but crews were able to shut valves and isolate the interruption in water service.
According to new data, it appears that Valve likely made about $1 billion from digitalCounter-Strike 2 (previously Global Offensive) cases and keys in 2023. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”
The Week In Games: What’s Coming Out Beyond Alan Wake 2
In Valve’s immensely popular free-to-play tactical FPS Counter-Strike 2, players can get cases by playing and earning them through level drops, or purchase cases from Steam’s community market. These cases come in different variants and can contain extremely rare and valuable cosmetic items like weapon skins. But once you have a case, you don’t just open it. You also need a key, which must be purchased either directly from Steam or from other players on the community market. And because CS2 is very popular, this lootbox system is making Valve a lot of money.
As spotted by Dexerto, third-party website CS2 Case Tracker recently released its 2023 year in review for cases. And the biggest stat is the estimated $980,000,000 that Valve earned from players buying keys to open cases. Because keys are just digital items that unlock cases, it’s not like it costs Valve all that much to make them or maintain them so the company likely absorbed almost all of that staggering figure as profit.
But wait, that massive $980 million stat is only how much money Valve likely made from the sale of keys. It doesn’t factor in the 15% cut they get from every case sold on the community market. When you factor that in, it becomes very likely that Valve made well over $1 billion on cases and keys in 2023 alone.
That probably is one of the reasons Valve isn’t in a rush to make new video games. They don’t really need to. Instead, they can sit back and let Steam and Counter-Strike fund all their virtual reality experiments and other hardware projects. Honestly, it’s a miracle we ever got Half-Life: Alyx.
One last stat for the road: According to CS2 Case Tracker’s data the most popular day to open cases was Wednesday. Why? I don’t know. But there you go. You can now likely win a bar bet with this weird bit of trivia.
Valve’s portable PC platform Steam Deck has enjoyed another good year, with a new OLED model and cheaper entry point contributing to a steady increase in popularity.
Throughout the year, Valve has been letting players know which titles are most popular on Steam Deck each month, with some consistent titles cropping up over the year.
Now we’ve reached the end of 2023, Valve has collated the most-played titles on Steam Deck for 2023 and put them in three ranking categories.
In the Platinum rank for the most played titles of all, small-scale hits like Vampire Survivors and Dave the Diver made an impact alongside big hitters such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5. Half-Life also entered the Platinum club after Valve gave the 1998 classic a Steam Deck overhaul for its 25th anniversary.
The Gold tier contains the likes of Street Fighter 6, Stardew Valley, and Counter Strike 2, while the Silver tier features PlayStation titles God of War and The Last of Us Part 1 alongside the surprise multiplayer hit Lethal Company.
The list only includes games Valve has given verified or playable status to for Steam Deck, so there are certain omissions, but you can view all three complete tiers below.
Most Played Steam Deck Games of 2023
Platinum
Cyberpunk 2077
Vampire Survivors
Baldur’s Gate 3
Grand Theft Auto 5
Dave the Diver
Starfield
Half-Life 1
Hogwarts Legacy
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Resident Evil 4
Elden Ring
Gold
Stardew Valley
Street Fighter 6
Red Dead Redemption 2
DREDGE
Hades
Sea of Stars
Counter Strike 2
Halls of Torment
Risk of Rain Returns
Dead Cells
Diablo 4
Brotato
Silver
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Overwatch 2
Cult of the Lamb
God of War
Fallout 4
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
Coral Island
The Last of Us Part 1
Lethal Company
Octopath Traveler 2
Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection Volume 1
Valve offered a peek behind the curtain of Steam’s biggest games of 2023 on Wednesday, revealing which titles dominated the sales charts on PC gaming’s biggest digital platform. Valve also divulged which games Steam users — and Steam Deck owners — played the most this year, with Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, and Sons of the Forest appearing in multiple top-12 lists.
Valve doesn’t provide specific sales figures or numbered rankings, but rather reveals the top-100 Steam games across multiple categories, breaking each 100-game list into multiple tiers based on sales or play performance:
Platinum: 1st – 12th
Gold: 13th – 24th
Silver: 25th – 50th
Bronze: 51st – 100th
The company’s data spans Jan. 1 to Dec. 15 of this year, so high-performing 2023 latecomers like The Finals mostly missed out on higher rankings on Valve’s lists. Here’s a breakdown of the biggest, most-played, and best-selling games on Steam this year.
Bestselling games on Steam in 2023
The top 12 (platinum-tier) games on Steam, based on total gross revenue earned in 2023, includes plenty of free-to-play titles like Apex Legends and Lost Ark, alongside paid premium games like Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield. (Publisher Activision also lists Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Warzone as simply Call of Duty on Steam, to explain that naming convention.)
Apex Legends
Baldur’s Gate 3
Call of Duty
Counter-Strike 2
Cyberpunk 2077
Destiny 2
Dota 2
Hogwarts Legacy
Lost Ark
PUBG: Battlegrounds
Sons Of The Forest
Starfield
Appearing just outside of the top 12, in the “gold” sales tier, are stalwart games like Dead by Daylight and Grand Theft Auto 5, alongside newer releases like the Resident Evil 4 remake and EA Sports FC 24.
Bestselling new games on Steam in 2023
Only a third of the top-12 bestselling games on Steam this year were actually released in 2023, so Valve highlights the new-release bestsellers separately. It also bases the following list on the first two weeks of revenue after launching.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
Baldur’s Gate 3
Cities: Skylines 2
EA Sports FC 24
Hogwarts Legacy
Payday 3
Remnant 2
Resident Evil 4
Sons Of The Forest
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Starfield
Street Fighter 6
Notable 2023 new releases like Dead Space, Mortal Kombat 1, and Party Animals ranked in the gold tier, while Diablo 4, Lies of P, and Six Days in Fallujah ranked in the silver tier. (Valve did not reveal bronze-tier data.)
Most played Steam games of 2023
The most-played Steam games of 2023 is a mostly familiar list, with venerable favorites Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Destiny 2 ranking in the top 12. Newcomers on the most-played list include big hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hogwarts Legacy, alongside challengers like Goose Goose Duck.
Here are the top-12 most-played Steam games of the year, all of which peaked at more than 300,000 concurrent players. (Valve said it excluded games with “brief spikes in player counts due to things like giveaways and free weekends.”)
Apex Legends
Baldur’s Gate 3
Counter-Strike 2
Destiny 2
Dota 2
Goose Goose Duck
Hogwarts Legacy
Lost Ark
PUBG: Battlegrounds
Sons Of The Forest
Starfield
Most played games on Steam Deck in 2023
Steam users played a lot of familiar favorites on the go this year, including blockbusters Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield, alongside smaller fare like Dave the Diver and Vampire Survivors. The original Half-Life also made it to the top 12 most-played Steam Deck games, almost assuredly because Valve made it free for its 25th anniversary.
Valve says the list of most-played Steam Deck games was measured by “daily active player counts throughout the year.”
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
Baldur’s Gate 3
Cyberpunk 2077
Dave the Diver
Elden Ring
Grand Theft Auto 5
Half-Life
Hogwarts Legacy
Resident Evil 4
Starfield
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Vampire Survivors
Just outside of the top-12 Steam Deck games are notable 2023 releases like Diablo 4, Dredge, and Risk of Rain Returns.
